I met with Purvis and interviewed him in the Dark Horse Comics offices.
Adam Gallardo: I wanted to start asking you about your background. Where are you from?
Leland Purvis: Oh, I am from Portland. For generations, actually.
AG: Oh really.
LP: Oh yeah.
AG: Do you find Portland - Having come from Boise, Idaho which has no comics or arts community at all, Portland seems to me to be really rich culturally.
LP: Portland is, I think, culturally rich in a lot of ways, but it sort of depends on what you are comparing it to. I mean, you hear people talk about the art community in Portland, and, you know, you compare it to San Francisco or New York and they sort of laugh and titter a little bit. But, you know, there is a whole bunch of small bands in Portland, there is a lot of creative energy here. I don't know that its something that necessarily gets placed on a continuum, but I think if you come from a smaller town, you'd be likely to find things that you wouldn't find where you're from, and if you come from a bigger city, you find that it's maybe lacking a little bit. But it's about my speed.
AG: So do you find the comics community here is what drew you to comics or were there comics around when you were a kid?
LP: Oh, yeah, I read comics when I was a kid and, I think, a lot of kids my age at the time. We could still get them at the 7-11 or the corner drug store and stuff, and that's mostly where I started. I don't know, I think I got in and out of comics as a young kid, and then into them again in grade school, because all my friends were into them, I just got hooked.
AG: Are either of your parents illustrators?
LP: No, no. My mom's done some visual work. Actually some of the first art I ever saw made was my mom doing woodcuts - um - which is a sort of a very stark black and white kind of thing. But, no. I mean there wasn't a whole lot of creative energy in the household or anything. I mean, they were both teachers - high school teachers.
AG: When did you realize you had some artistic talent?
LP: Well, I don't know. That's sort of a leading question. I am not sure that I would even say that yet. I think there are some people that would say that talent is maybe somewhat indistinguishable from years of hard work, and I would like to paint myself as maybe in that category.
AG: Right. OK, so when did you realize you had a desire to do comics?
LP: I knew -- well, when you find yourself drawing a lot, every day, you know. I was twelve or thirteen and carrying around a sketch book everywhere, and all that, sure.
AG: And you have been self-publishing Vox for what - 2 years now?
LP: Um, yes. The first Vox came out in, I think, November of 2000. Yeah.
AG: And you received the Xeric grant for Vox?
LP: I did get a Xeric grant, yeah, that's true.
AG: What was that experience like? Does Kevin Eastman call you on the phone...?
LP: No, in fact it was a little anti-climactic. The deadline submission was the end of July, I think, and you were supposed to hear, officially, in September, and it was getting close to about a week or two from Halloween when I was trying to decide whether or not I was going to submit something [to the Xeric foundation] again for January, when I got the notice. So, I don't know is if it was just late, or if I was an after-thought or what. But by that time I had sort of given up on the idea, but I found the Xeric people to be entirely businesslike and very professional. And, yeah, all in all it was very rewarding. It helped me out a great deal.
AG: In what ways?
LP: Financially. Financially, clearly, that is what it's about. It's a grant.
AG: Right.
LP: And, you know, people, especially in the alternative comics community know what the Xeric grant is and it means a little something. So when you add that on to the little sign you've got on a table at a convention or something, some people may stop and look that may have passed you by otherwise.
AG: Does it help with distributors, like with Diamond, or. . .
LP: I can say almost certainly that it didn't help with Diamond. Not that they said anything about it, but I just can't imagine it would be among the list of things they would look to as a saleable quality. They are looking at the numbers pretty strictly, as far as I can tell.
AG: Was Vox the first thing you had ever done seriously had you been doing minis before that?
LP: I certainly have been working and doing my own material for a long time and I have contributed to other people's self-published projects and things like that. It was the first time I really sort of dedicated a lot of energy to doing very much my own thing and deciding that no matter what, it was going to get out there. And just that decision I think was pretty rewarding and so is the creative energy. And when you decide to commit that much to something that you are doing, you start to take yourself more seriously -- in a good way as opposed to in a wrong kind of sense. And I think that was pretty healthy for the work, if nothing else.
AG: Now, I know that I have seen two minis of Pubo.
LP: Yeah.
AG: But I am not sure what the chronology is. Like did Pubo . . ?
LP: The red one came first. I was going to SPX 2000 with the first Vox and that was actually before the grant money came through. And I thought I needed a little something else on the table, and I thought I would create a little mini like one I'd seen some other time, and thought, "Well, how hard can that be?" And so I made a little 16 panel, 16-page mini to take with me. So that's when it happened.
AG: Right. So, talk a little bit about what Pubo is, what it's about.
LP: Well, OK. Quick little back up as to how the idea occurred to me. It's probably actually not that original. I was listening to a radio interview with Martin Amis, the son of the author Kingsley Amis, and he's an author also. And for whatever reason he talked about one point in his life where he had terrible tooth pain and the subject came up about how there are more nerves in your mouth than there are in most of the parts of your body. And this sort of homunculus was described and people have seen it, you know, where they re-draw the figure in terms of size based on the nerve ends. And I was just hearing this over the radio and the visuals were sort of popping into my head and I just started drawing. And I thought, "That's a really neat Idea!" And it's neat for a couple of reasons because, aside from just the fun -- it really lends itself to a cartoon look -- but at the same time it can work as a metaphor because this figure is visually representational of the internals we all carry with us. I mean, our hands are very important. They aren't all that large, but with Pubo, visually, it's as large as it is in our own mind.
AG: Right. And this - this didn't occur naturally, either. He wasn't born this way, right?
LP: Right, right. Well, there is some talk that all comic heroes are created by scientists and government, or they come from outer space, and I'm not sure it's wrong. But it sort of lends itself to Pubo's generally disgruntled nature that he it wasn't something that he volunteered for.
AG: Right, right. So you mentioned that its a metaphor for how we view ourselves, but --
LP: Yeah, right. And , you know, he seems sort of a very emotional reactionary figure -- a little petulant, and he just sort of wants what he wants, and is a creature of appetites. And so he is reflective of more of the human inner world that civilized society tends to keep the wraps on.
AG: I think its interesting that -- saying that -- you have him in the animal world. He seems to be interacting mostly with animals that he can understand and speak with. Is there a reason you had him doing that instead of interacting with other people?
LP: Well, sure. There are a couple of reasons he is out in the woods, but yeah. That's essentially it. It's Pubo making a transition from the -- and this is another theme in there - it's the technological world versus the natural world, and Pubo moving from one to the other by virtue of his circumstances he's in. And I think being from the Northwest and growing up in certain parts where there were a lot of woods and creeks and things like that, that the environment was really attractive.
AG: You have a history of self-publishing. Was there a reason you had decided to have Dark Horse publish Pubo instead of doing it on your own?
LP: I haven't debated this with anyone else who has done it, but I can't imagine anybody that has self-published for any length of time that wouldn't like somebody to do it for them. It's a lot of work. And the thing is, I was taking on more work even than a lot of people do because I was literally making these things myself. All the way to physically folding and stapling the things. And you know, when you are doing that at two in the morning, and carrying a day job too, it'd be lovely to get a box of them, finished, in the mail to me.
AG: Yeah.
LP: But, yeah. Another thing, too, is the editorial process has been very interesting and helpful to me in ways that I guess I'm a little surprised by. That I've been able to see and improve my own work from a little bit different perspective that you don't have when you are working in a bubble.
AG: Right. So you didn't have anyone before that that would read and comment on your work?
LP: No - not really. I was pretty -- pretty isolated -- and probably on purpose. Being something of a control freak on certain levels. And uh, and that sometimes is good and sometimes is not entirely healthy when you lose your perspective.
AG: The flip side to that is, how easy is it for you to take suggestions that Scott [Allie, Leland's editor on Pubo] gives you and use them, or do you feel . . .?
LP: Having come very recently from the self-published area, I hadn't had lots of interaction with editors. And, of course, you hear all sort of nightmare stories from a lot of people who do work-for-hire about editors, this and that, and they don't know whatever, but my experience has been nothing but positive. And Scott clearly sees and understands the material in ways that make it helpful.
And he's not somebody who is just sort of trying to think of something to say in order to justify, you know, sorting paper. He really has a clear idea of what works and what doesn't work and why. And, that being the case, it needs to be taken seriously. There have been cases where he made a suggestion or wondered why I did something and I was able to say that I thought about that ahead of time and here is why I maybe think that's not quite right, but that's the way, you know?
AG: So, do you think you will continue after this, doing both sel-publishing and working with a publisher, or do you see yourself going strictly with...
LP: The next job I've got lined up is working for a self-published writer who hires artists. And it's a fairly good-sized project. And that's just what came up next. You know, as long as I keep getting work - I'd like to do more Voxes to be honest. I really enjoyed it, I liked the short story. Right now I want to dedicate a lot of my energy to all the work, but a but I would like to do more Voxes. I keep having ideas that I scribble down on something and throw in a folder for Vox #5 but we'll have to see. The numbers just weren't there for that. So I don't know. Maybe when I become famous.
AG: Are you thinking about having Vox published by someone else?
LP: I think not with Vox so much. Those stories you, know, are ones that on a certain level don't lend themselves so much to editorial input. They are little one-shot things, they are not meant for a greater continuum. And some of them are so short and esoteric that there is not a whole lot -- there is another thing about Vox is I was able to do a lot of experimenting. And working in different styles and things like that. So, its something I'd like to return to, but right now. I'm really sort of happy following Pubo.
AG: And after this Pubo series, do you think we will see any more Pubo in the future?
LP: Well, that may be up to, you know, the way things work out. Just like anything else, if something finds a great deal of success, and people are interested in seeing it, I can certainly see myself doing more. If it disappears, and nobody says anything out of politeness, then, you know, probably not [laughs]. So, yeah. I find the characters still a lot of fun and I have ideas where it might go beyond this.
AG: So, as a self-publisher, you must gave a lot of hope for the comics industry...
LP: Well, I don't know. I think a lot of people really like the medium of comics, and its interesting to me, and I worry as to where its going. I'd really like to see the stories in this medium get out to a more popular audience and I think as long as they are stuck going strictly to comic shops, that's a little scary. But, you know, I don't have any solutions any better than anybody does about how to approach a wider market.
AG: It seems that some people are trying to work on solutions, like -- Borders? I think its either Borders or Barnes & Noble, they have had so much success selling trade paperbacks that they might be able to have their own specialty shops.
LP: Wow, you know, I've got mixed feelings about that, I think.
AG: Except that it seems like if you release it under that name, Barnes & Noble, that you are going to get people in the shop.
LP: You know, I think I disagree. I think what would happen is very much what Barnes & Noble and Borders have done to the independent booksellers. They would put a lot of little Mom and Pop shops out of business because they would be able to buy in massive volume.
AG: Right.
LP: And get their unit price way down, and probably they would get it way before anybody else, and those other little shops just wouldn't be able to compete. Never mind the massive marketing engine that would be behind those. What I would like to see is -- some of it has already been going on -- is have writers and artists think more in terms of a finished story and a trade paperback and story arcs so that those can then go to places like Barnes & Noble where they might sell to a wider audience. If there's a way, keep the price down `cause I think that's scary for a lot of people, but, yeah, I don't know. Wow, I hadn't heard that about Borders making their own shops.
AG: That was a rumor I read on ther Internet. The that thing you are talking about regarding more accessible story arcs seems kind of like Warren Ellis' idea about "pop comics". You know, keep every series down to three issues so they can get out quickly, be collected and on the shelves, and that kind of thing.
LP: Yeah.
AG: Discreet little pieces instead of these things that people have to buy for thirty years if they want the whole story.
LP: You can't say that Cerebus isn't an amazing feat, but, you know, you really can't pick up one issue and get it. So, I don't know. I don't fear for the comics medium in terms of the Internet, you know. That old thing that they though TV was going to kill the movies, or whatever, I think comics is going to be there as long as people want to make them. Because there is a real love of the medium, and artists and people just like telling stories with pictures, and I don't think that is going to go away. The trick is finding a regular way to get that to a wider and wider group of people who want to read them.
Pubo #1, first in a three-issue miniseries, written and drawn by Leland Purvis will be available in comics shops November 13. You should also look for his self-published, Xeric Award-winning series, Vox.